Educational Social Media in K-12

As a former high school English teacher, the topic of educational social media in the classroom is one that is very near and dear to my heart. I define "educational social media" as this which allows for an environment similar to social media, but is still teacher-controlled. My last year teaching was 2016, which of course, saw social media in full swing for younger people. In my classroom, the closest I'd gotten to utilizing social media was with Edmodo in 2012-2014, then Google Classroom in 2015-2016.

When I started using Edmodo, I was surprised by its similarity to Facebook (or, as my students referred to Edmodo, "lame Facebook".) I taught twelfth grade English and, while I initially had some apprehension, I found the tool to be really easy to use. I had over 150 students, and it was very difficult to keep track of who was absent from class, when they returned, or what they missed. I made a habit of posting class activities and notes to our Edmodo page to keep those students in the loop. Since I had all senior students, I could depend that they either had a smart phone or computer/laptop where they could keep up with class assignments and notes. I had a similar experience with my high school freshmen using Google Classroom.

There were a few pitfalls to using educational social media. One was that I quickly learned I had to disable comments in some areas of the course. One or two students would respond to assignments with legitimate thoughts and questions, while others would respond to those questions to mock those students, or intentionally give them false information. The other issue were the small instances of students who said they didn't have access to the internet at certain times, although fortunately there were never cases of prolonged disconnection. A final issue that I noticed went away over time, was of a lacking computer literacy for some of my students, which seemed less prominent in my later years teaching.

Have you ever used educational social media as a student or teacher? What was your experience?